And so it begins…

Kicking and Screaming

Enough already. I’ll do it, I’ll do it. As of this writing I am throwing my hat in the ring and declaring myself a blogger. But in doing so, I am not making any promises in terms of frequency, topics, or respectfulness of my output. I do promise to be entertaining, most times thought provoking and unabashedly 100% honest – at least in terms of how I see this crazy world of ours…which I love so much! So to all of you out there who asked to hear what I have to say about “stuff” and keep in touch more frequently than our eTail or Shop.org run-ins – this is for you!

What’s it like?

So what’s it like to be on the vendor side of things and no longer a key retail client that everyone clamors after? Well, not bad actually – in fact rather fantastic. Because during these past years, from my early days at Ofoto, to Wine.com and then most recently at DirectlyHome.com, the one thing I learned was an intense passion for the importance of the customer experience! In fact, I was the VP of Customer Experience at Wine.com when there were perhaps only a handful of people in the industry to have such a title. And now, I have the chance to influence not just one shopping site at a time, but hundreds and perhaps even an entire industry of sites with the vision of how customer reviews can make a huge difference in improving the online customer shopping experience and the shopping decision making process.

And, of course, I should mention that at my last company, I was actually a client of PowerReviews so I was intimately familiar of the industry having evaluated both an in-house system and the competition as well. So coming to work for a company with a vision and product I so easily identified with was, well, a natural progression for me!

Word-of-Mouth

Now, was there ever a topic more perfectly suited for someone like me than this? And while I embrace and respect the power of words when used as a tool for the sharing of ideas and experiences, I was unprepared when their intentional use was to destroy or malign. And that is exactly what our competition has done, to use word-of-mouth to level falsities against our company

As crazy as this sounds, can you believe that they tell our clients and prospects that PowerReviews has no moderators or content analysts? That would be like saying that farmers have no laborers to pick their crops, that every single piece of produce is collected by machines without any human assistance of any kind. Well, it just doesn’t work that way for farmers and certainly not for us. In fact we have an incredible team of content analysts that are the backbone of our customer reviews solution. You can learn more about out team of moderators by visiting our page dedicated to them.

More importantly though, it this misguided use of word-of-mouth to intentionally mislead retailers, plant untruths and basically take advantage of their limited knowledge of the review industry. And if I was a retailer today and was told such falsities, I would not only be upset, but I would wonder what other false claims they were making, realized I was being “played” and then, basically, throw them out of my office. That’s just me; I know each of you will find your own way of dealing with this underhanded and disrespectful treatment.

Thanks for listening while I got that off my chest, but it saddens me to think that our great industry with all the positive strides we, as a community, continue to make to advance our shared goal of improving the online customer experience, contains a few bad seeds like this.

It’s a Wrap

Well, there it is my first installment. I hope you will come back from time to time and check in with me. And in closing I have a request for all of you – let me know topics or issues you would like to hear my take on.

Cheers!

Jay Shaffer

*disclaimer. While I admittedly serve as the VP of Marketing at PowerReviews.com and therefore have direct ties with Buzzillions.com, the views expressed here are solely my own and are not meant to be endorsements of products and or services mentioned herein.